Asylum: Sanctuary in a Bordered World

Catalog description

In a bordered world, those placed outside its borders are often denied their rights, dehumanized, and even killed with impunity. This course surveys the broad literature on “asylum” to examine how our bordered world came to be, and how those at humanity’s edges seek and often fail to find asylum. How did the political right of asylum develop historically and what explains its demise today? What remains of “the human” when people no longer have “a right to have rights”? What does a world where the stateless are systematically persecuted do to our common humanity? Addressing these difficult ethical and political questions, this course asks us to consider how we are all inevitably entangled in complex formations of violence at a global scale, and what a different, more equal, and less violent world might look like.